Do not speak ill of the dead: that is the convention. Yet any honest account of the life of Martin McGuinness must acknowledge his terrible IRA past as well as his later role in the Northern Ireland peace process and power-sharing government.

I shall never forget being told in the mid-Nineties by a senior member of John Major’s government that McGuinness would already have been in prison – probably for life – if wiretap evidence had been admissible in court. In 2007, McGuinness declared piously that anyone who knew the location of the body of Captain Robert Nairac – an undercover British officer, brutally tortured and murdered in Ravensdale, County Louth, in 1977 – should come forward. Those who had been engaged in counter-terrorism at the time remarked wryly that McGuinness need only look in the mirror to find someone who knew precisely what had happened to Nairac.

Though he sometimes denied that he had been a member of the IRA, this was not what he said in court in 1973, after being apprehended near a car containing more than 100kg of explosives and 5,000 rounds of ammunition. “We have fought against the killing of our people,” he declared. “I am a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann [the IRA] and very, very proud of it”.

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Despite his protestations to the contrary, British ministers knew that he remained, at the very least, a member of the IRA Army Council, rather than a purely-civilian representative of Sinn Fein. Indeed, this was precisely why they talked to him: he was not a go-between, but the authentic voice of the Republican armed struggle.

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From this statement flowed the eventual IRA ceasefires (1994-96, 1997- ), the Good Friday Agreement, and the eventual establishment of a power-sharing devolved administration: in all of this, McGuinness was intimately involved. Though Gerry Adams, the notional leader of Sinn Fein, was more often the spokesman for the Republican movement, McGuinness was regarded within the UK Government as the key figure in negotiations. He was articulate, direct, formidable.

In 2007, he became Deputy First Minister, serving – incredibly – his former sworn enemy, Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party. The two men established an unlikely rapport, and became known as the “chuckle brothers”.

Less smooth were his final months in office, overshadowed by a scandal involving an energy incentive scheme championed by the DUP. McGuinness resigned in January, forcing new elections in Northern Ireland.

His death will undoubtedly focus minds in Number Ten: Brexit is rapidly becoming a crisis for the United Kingdom, threatening the union of its constituent parts. The mood of uncertainty in Ulster – fuelled, in particular, by the prospect of a hard border with the Republic of Ireland – is at least as great as it is in Scotland.

In these debates, as elsewhere, the absence of McGuinness is certain to be felt. He will be remembered for bringing the Republican movement to the table of power – as will the trail of blood that led him there.

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